How to successfully exit and sell a business

Posted on Thursday, February 13th, 2014 at 7:09 pm.

About Jonathan Lea

Jonathan is a specialist corporate and commercial solicitor who has over 13 years of experience at both large international City firms and smaller practices.
For the last five years Jonathan has worked on a self-employed basis with a network of other independent lawyers focused on serving the needs of entrepreneur-led businesses and startups around the UK and further afield.
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Yesterday’s Pivotal Tribes event at Google Campus featured a panel of entrepreneurs who have successfully grown businesses and then sold them. The panel discussed with the audience their stories and top ideas on how to ensure the best return possible is generated on an exit. I’ll update this post with more photos later on.

Thanks very much to sponsors Smith & Williamson and Gannons Solicitors for supporting the event, enabling it to be free to attendees and enough refreshments to be supplied for everyone.

The panel were as follows:

• Guy Rigby, Head of Entrepreneurs at Smith & Williamson, an experienced chartered accountant and entrepreneur, with directorships and shareholdings in a number of varied businesses and author of the critically acclaimed ‘From Vision to Exit – The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Buying and Selling a Business’.

• Karen Darby, current Founder & CEO of CrowdMission (the world’s first equity-based crowdfunding platform for social and environmental businesses) and also Founder of Call Britannia and SimplySwitch, which produced a x22 return for its investors.

• Andy Tait, Partner at the Pembridge Partnership and Co-Founder of Collider12 (the UK’s first startup accelerator for ‘B2Brand’ companies) and co-founded and served as a main Board Director and Vice President of both private and publicly listed companies in the UK and USA.

• Nick Cronin, Partner at business advisory company Bean Partners and former executive at a variety of public and private companies across the globe, including in the Clean-Tech, Med-Tech, Chemicals, Oil & Gas and Infrastructure sectors, where he has been responsible for the growth and successful sale of multiple organisations.

Here are some of the points made by the panel that resonated with the audience as they tweeted through the event (as well as a video clip at the end):

If on a public market get blown by the whim of sentiment regardless of profit you are making says @andyt8#businessexit

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